eBay release and recall latest v2.0 mobile app

eBay launched the latest version 2.0 of the eBay Android Mobile app on Wednesday this week and were inundated with complaints that it couldn’t connect with eBay. The app was recalled and eBay say “Our recent v2.0 update released on 9/12/12 has been recalled. We are temporarily replacing it with version 1.8. A new update for version 2.0 will be available shortly. We apologize for the inconvenience“.

The best advice if you use the eBay App is to uninstall and redownload from Google Play if you’ve got a dodgy version.

There was also a wider API issue on Thursday evening, where eBay said that some people may have experienced aff_link("http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/201209131608441.html","difficulties using eBay Mobile applications or making API calls to eBay","","UK"); ?>. However that issue was fixed the same day so it was almost certainly unrelated with the eBay App issue as the app was withdrawn the day before.

Regardless of the cause it’s not been a great week for eBay Mobile. With one in every ten transactions on eBay UK being completed via a mobile device these apps have to work. Whilst the API issue was fixed within a couple of hours, version 2.0 hasn’t been re-released for Android and in the interim some buyers were unable to place those last minute bids that win auctions.

I’m really looking forward to getting the new app back, I won’t spoil the surprise but there’s some nice tweaks in there which will probably be very welcome to both buyers and sellers!

I’m not 100% sure but I think their new app actually froze my phone for about 30 minutes. The phone would pause for minutes at a time and say “eBay has stopped”. At one point I had to remove the battery so I could restart it. I eventually went into settings and forced it to unload and the freezing stopped.

I suspect this freezing was related to the API issues because it happened at exactly the same time I noticed API timeouts with my apps and I know the mobile app must make calls to certain Trading API calls for the notifications it makes.